The syntactic and semantic roots of floating quantification

Through the study of floating quantifiers in a variety of languages, I demonstrate that floating quantification is not a uniform phenomenon and outline a series of puzzles that force us to adopt a two-part analysis. I argue that certain floating quantifiers are related to their nominal associate by syntactic transformation (the stranding approach, Sportiche 1988; Miyagawa 1989) and that others are related only semantically (the adverbial approach, Dowty and Brody 1984; Bobaljik 1995; Doetjes 1997). Evidence for this split comes from the syntactic distribution of these elements within and across languages and from two other points of difference. First, I show that each type of floating quantifier imposes a different restriction on the movement of its nominal associate. An adverbial floating quantifier restricts its associate to A-movement, while a stranded floating quantifier restricts its associate to A'-movement. Furthermore, these two classes of quantifiers divide along semantic lines: Adverbial floating quantifiers have exhaustive semantics, while stranded adnominal floating quantifiers are non-exhaustive. The analysis developed here provides an explanation for these syntactic and semantic differences.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Fitzpatrick, Justin Michael

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Norvin Richards.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37420

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37420